LUKAS AVENDANOLUKAS AVENDANO

LUKAS AVENDANOLUKAS AVENDANO

Lukas Avendaño
Mexico

In a contingency my mother gave me birth in a land surrounded by mosques in Tehuantepec, the midwife put a machete to heat the fire and when a red reed was already red, I cut my belly button. My navel was buried under an almond tree, so as not to break the tradition they called me as my father, my education was set in the dinner of a family of reluctant Indians, cracked leg Indians and sodomite Indians.

“Lukas Avendaño is an emerging Mexican performance artist whose recent work constitutes a queer performatic intervention of Mexican nationalistic representations, particularly that of Zapotec Tehuana women. Avendaño embodies the complex identity of muxes, or male homosexuals from the Tehuantepec Isthmus where he was born. His cross-dressing performance interweaves ritual dances with autobiographical passages and actions that involve audience members, in order to challenge the widely held view of a gay-friendly indigenous culture and point towards the existence of lives that negotiate pain and loneliness with self-affirming pride”. Antonio Prieto Stambaugh.